Archive for the ‘efficient’ Category

We added a couple new tools to Web Tools by Perceptus today. We also cleaned up the look of the site a little – it’s gone all the way from ugly to almost passable. Similar to our blog, over time, the trickle of traffic to our web based text mangling site has grown, and it had earned a bit of our effort to tidy it up. Who knows, if this keeps up, we’ll have to keep adding more tools!

The new tools?

The Whitespace Trimmer – Paste a blob of text. Every line of text will be trimmed of spaces on the left and right and returned to you.

At Perceptus, we deal with the Canadian Dollar to US Dollar exchange rate a lot. Doesn’t every small business in Canada? We need to convert our US revenues to Canadian CAD amounts for tax purposes, among other things.

We used to use the common websites like XE.com or X-Rate.com to get our historical exchange rates. But those sites are too slow if you need to look up a half a dozen exchange rates from the past. It takes several clicks to retrieve a single exchange rate for a date in the past.

So, I went looking for something better to use. In fact, I was prepared to create a new tool for looking up historical Canada to USA exchange rates on the Web Tools by Perceptus site if I couldn’t find a satisfactory alternative.

Unfortunately for tools.perceptus.ca, I did find a reasonably good way to get a lot of old exchange rates in an efficient way. The IMF website, of all places, has a great custom table generator.

However, this link (until it breaks, anyway) will take you directly to every CAD to USD rate in the last 365 days in a nice and tidy table. Just generate the table, and look up the rate you need for the date you need.